I believe and hope this will be a tool helpful to all people willing to hightlight a specific area of their video, with a rectangle or a bubble so that watchers have their attention driven to the relevant part of the screen.

I believe and hope this will be a tool helpful to all people already owning a video editing tool, and who want to do tutorials or demonstrations: this way they will have a low-cost extension to do high-quality screencasts.

I frequently have to record webinars and software demos, and was looking for a tool to record what happens on my screen. Finding no affordable solution, and no appropriate freeware, (and also for fun), I decided to develop my own screencasting tool which is now available in a beta status.

If you are interested to be a beta tester, please feel free to register at http://m.fbmn-software.com/webApp/EVAL?product=SCC. You will then receive the beta version, so that you can test it and make any relevant feedback. To thank them for their help, I will offer to the 20 first testers a 50% discount on the first official release when available - I will shortly and individually confirm by email that they are part of the 20.

Many thanks in advance for your help,

Frederic - FBmn Software

More details on the software:

Being familiar with Vegas, my favourite NLE software, I did not want a tool which provides its own editing capabilities: I did not want to pay twice these features.

So I developed FBmn Software ScreenRecorder, which catches the screen, mouse and keyboard events in a video+audio clip, which can then be edited in Sony Vegas or any other AVI-compliant NLE.

The benefits are the following:

- the price of ScreenRecorder AND a tool like Vegas Movie Studio will be significantly cheaper than other professional solutions

- compared to various solutions, a set of options lets you embed several features in the video such as:

* all specific mouse pointers of any software are caught in the video (whereas some software always display an arrow even when the mouse actually shows as a crosshair)

* sounds can be added for keystrokes and mouse clicks

* legends for keystrokes and mouse clicks can be displayed.

* Alt, Ctrl, Shift... combinations are recognized and displayed in the recorded video.

- all the knowledge you may have of your usual NLE is immediately available, you don't have to learn a new tool for editing videos.

- all the advanced, extensible features of a standard NLE tool are available for screencasts. You don't have to stick to the ones developed within a specific screen recording tool.

Note: the tool assumes that you have an appropriate codec installed, such as Lagarith, or Xvid for instance. This video (recorded with ScreenRecorder itself) demonstrates how to use the tool, starting by the setup of the Lagarith codec (which is quite straightforward by the way).

The FBmn Software's White Balance GPU plug-in now features a new slider to let you control the strength of the color correction, continuously ranging from full WB correction (default) to plain original colors.